June 2025
On AI, chalk pastels, and other good things.
Image above: an exploration into the world of chalk pastels. Yes, they are just as messy as you would imagine but they are also so fun and I just love all the colors! If you have any tips on how to not get chalk dust all over absolutely everything, do let me know. Until then, I choose to embrace the mess— chalk pastels may be the opposite of AI art.
On AI
After graduating college with a BA in fine art during a recession, I struck out into the world determined to be an artist. I waited tables at a pizza pub and created art for gallery shows. About 6 months into this hustle, it became clear that as a young adult fresh out of undergrad with no patrons, I had a long, hard road ahead of me, and so I had a decision to make. I could either continue to hustle at service industry jobs that might leave more time for art making (but often left me so physically exhausted that this wasn’t the case), or I could try my hand at a traditional job and try to make art “on the side.”
After hundreds of job applications and years of unpaid or minimum wage “internships,” I finally landed a well-paid role as a designer at a tech company. I was elated, my mom sent me flowers— I had made it! I loved every minute of this new job, from tightening up designs on my hour long commute each way via public transit to the frequent “happy hours” that my coworkers and I joyfully left the office at 3pm to attend.
Years passed and things changed— After two company acquisitions within the streaming music industry and countless “pivots” on projects I was working on due to “reprioritization” by executive teams, I began to become jaded and disheartened. I would spend months working on designs only to have them be scrapped due to the company “changing priorities.” I learned that investors and board members are the ones who really call the shots, and that while the companies I worked at said they were trying improve the world of music, what really drove their direction was money.
I decided to make a pivot myself and enter the world of mental health tech. Surely such a meaningful and purpose-driven sector would be less beholden to the whims of investors and would be driven to make meaningful change. I’m sure you already know where this is going— I’ve worked for a number of mental health tech companies at this point and I can safely say that they are driven just as much by increasing their financial bottom line as any other industry, maybe even more so. It’s so obvious to me now that of course the goal of a business is to make money, but at the time I really believed that companies could have a deeper purpose than financial gain.
Since I was young, I’ve struggled with the fact that we live in a capitalist society. From moment to moment I waver between wanting to burn the system down to trying to girlboss my way to the top. In the months since I left my full-time job in the tech sector, the haze of the “golden handcuffs” that comes with this industry has begun to clear and I’ve come to see that tech companies are the same as the big businesses that I swore I would never work for as a teen. Yes, they might appear more “disruptive” and have more progressive perks, but under the surface they are exactly the same as the desk jobs our parents worked. Due to the way these companies market themselves as “mission driven” and constantly remind you of the “importance” of the work you’re doing, when you work for one of them you really do believe that you are “disrupting” something. Between the financial handcuffs and the allure of positively impacting the world, tech companies are able to create an army of smart, talented people to execute their demands at hyperspeed, leaving them too overworked or burnt out to consider the full ramifications of the products they’re creating.
When AI first started making a big buzz a few years ago, I was confused. At all the startups I had worked at before, we used “algorithms” to track user behavior and serve personalized content— wasn’t this AI? As time passed, I learned more about generative AI, LLMs, and the sheer speed at which AI was progressing and couldn’t help but be swept up in all the excitement. It’s going to do our jobs for us, leaving us more time for the IMPORTANT stuff! It’s going to cure cancer! It’s going to solve the climate crisis! As time passed, my interest continued to grow, but in a different way— the more I read and learned about AI, the more sure I became that it too was traveling at a speed that was already out of the control of those creating it.
Alongside the AI boom, the research about the detrimental effects of social media (and big tech’s knowledge of the harm they were causing) continued to flood in. We learned about social media’s effects on the brain, especially young brains, and tech CEOs were brought to court to explain what they were doing to mitigate the widespread harm they were causing. As I watched headlines about AI and social media fill my newsfeed, I became increasingly confused. At the same time that we were learning about the huge detrimental effects of unregulated social media access, we were continuing to push generative AI forward at a rate that even employees at prominent AI companies viewed as unethical. Surely there was something I was missing— some great benefit to speeding up AI progress that outweighed the common sense recommendation to slow things down and think more carefully about how it is being implemented.
I continue to search for research with an eye towards optimism, but the more I read, the more I realize that the AI boom is just another in a long series of capitalist movements masquerading as “innovation.” While I want to focus on the potential for AI to heal us and our planet, what I’m seeing in practice is actually more harm to both (the planet and us) and much more profit for the businesses themselves than for the people they claim to be helping. Like many “do-gooder” tech companies that came before them, even the “ethical” AI companies that were supposed to save us from the potentially harmful actions of less-thoughtful bots have succumb to the unrelenting lures of capitalism.
Even after all of this, my optimism remains intact: I WANT to believe that AI can help us. I want to believe in a positive future where AI can do the annoying, tedious parts of our jobs and allow us more free time for the things we love; can speed up green energy grids to reduce consumption rather than add to it; can give us 24/7 access to companions that aid our human interactions rather than take away from them. But as time passes, all I see are these things getting worse. I’ve also increasingly heard the message that we all need to “get on board” with the AI revolution and to keep up with it’s relentless speed rather than question it. In schools and workplaces we’re being told that we need to become “AI literate” in order to keep up with technological advancements and stay relevant in the workplace. While this initially scared me into taking many online workshops and doing deep dives into how I can use AI to enable my workflows, I’m now looking at things a bit differently.
Just as using social media has always been a choice, AI utilization is a choice that we can choose to adapt as much as is helpful for us. Rather than start thinking of every possible way we can get AI to work for us (as many employers are now pushing employees to do), I wonder how we can all become more thoughtful about when and how we use this technology. Yes, I have experienced the magic of having ChatGPT spit out a cover letter for me in seconds that would have taken me an hour, and yes it was amazing, but is that momentary convenience worth me losing my critical thinking skills? Is it worth spending gallons of water to generate content monotonous content that likely includes factual errors? Do we want to live in a world where our jobs become staring at screens and monitoring/fine-tuning bots and our free time is spent consuming content generated by AI?
A couple months ago, I got so fed up with the direction AI was headed that I decided to stop using it entirely. After some reflection, I realized that I had succumb to some pretty stark black and white thinking— choosing all or nothing is often not the best path forward, and despite my disillusionment I can still see a possible positive path forward for our use of AI. My current thinking is that what is needed is not a boycott, but more thoughtful utilization and continued commentary on the state of AI not just by companies and research institutions, but by us, the consumers using the product. If there’s anything that we should have learned by now it’s that we can’t trust companies to have our best interests at heart. It’s up to us to decide what tasks we want AI to help us with and where we want to draw the line. In a world where we can get anything we want with the click of a button, what does it mean to be human? I feel hopeful that this is a question that we still get to choose the answer to. I’m still deciding where to draw the line for myself but I do know that if we don’t fight to keep our critical thinking skills, we will lose them, and for me that’s reason enough to think more critically about my usage of AI.
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Some Little Pictures:
(from top left to bottom right)
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Image above: a screenshot from my current favorite relaxing youtube account. it’s like living in the country and getting all the therapeutic benefits while watching someone else do all the hard work involved for you.
June Playlist: Chill Background
This month I’ve once again mainly been listening to a variety of “chill background” playlists and albums, so I don’t have much music-wise to report here. Because I don’t want to leave you hanging, though, I will once again link you to my current favorite calming video so you too can dream of days spent picking roses while your partner scythes with their bros in the fields all day. Enjoy!
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Image above: more chalk pastels, my current obsession. I asked above but will ask again: if you have any tips on how not to get chalk dust everywhere, please do let me know! And please do not say “tiny vacuum” or “use an easel” because that’s all Reddit had to offer and I’m like OK I hear you but there has to be more.
Recent Work: Chalk Pastels
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen or touched chalk pastels before but if you have, you likely had the same response as me which was: I hate these and will never touch them again! Over the years I’ve tried them out but only ever spent a few minutes with them before tossing them aside in favor of something less messy. The other day I stumbled upon artist Louna Safon and that all changed— the way she used these pastels was so gentle, colorful, and inspiring that I had to try again! Yes, they are still super messy, but I’m having a great time exploring how the colors blend together and using chalk pastel pencils to add details on top of color washes.
Have you ever used chalk pastels? Let me know your thoughts if so! I’m open to any and all tips and tricks <3
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Some Other Good Things
We get a lot of comments from passerby about this cat solarium that is sticking out of our bedroom window and I just got an email that there’s a sale going on so figured I’d share! Yes, it’s expensive, but let me tell you this thing is built to last! 5 stars would buy again.
I have officially replaced my electrolyte packets with LMNT’s DIY version and do recommend! You need to add lemon juice or some fruit flavor of your choosing to make it taste less like the ocean but honestly ocean flavor is fine with me.
Almost done reading Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk, which I’ve dragged out for over a year now because I don’t want it to be over! I love folk tales and this collection in particular is such a great mix of magical realism and traditional folklore.
The “Japanese Walking” trend has been everywhere I look lately and I am interested. Has anyone tried this? I tried a few times and am skeptical— originally I thought the idea was that you were supposed to be able to get 10k steps within half an hour with this technique but turns out its just supposed to be “as effective” as the normal 10k step goal. Tell me your thoughts if you’ve tried it!
I’m trying to get back into journaling— anyone have any tips? I had been trying to do the 1 line a day journal and will probably try that again because it seems like the simplest way to get started again, but REALLY what I would like is an amazing sketchbook practice like Sha’an d’Anthes. The little consumer in me thinks I need to get the cute sketchbook she uses but the wise me knows that really I just need to set a routine to get a daily practice going. One friend told me that she’s made it a habit to do some writing every time she reads something that she finds interesting/wants to learn from, which I really like too. Will keep you posted on this one but do let me know if you have any strategies that work for you!
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Thanks for reading – see you next month!
100! It should give us pause that AI generated content- whether music, image or text- feels soulless. Flooding our world, but more importantly, our minds with content and patterns that are hyper-processed will naturally have significant impact. Appreciate you taking the time to write out so much of what I feel <3
Léonie Watson‘s talk at FFConf 2024: AI and Accessibility: the Good, the Bad, and the Bollocks points to a positive usage of the tech—for accessibility purposes. But generative AI tends to garbage, mostly. I am using Copilot and find that it autocompletes helpfully a bit more than half the time. But like you I am very very skeptical, and like you I see it as bound up with the worst of capitalism: dehumanizing and extractive.